Writing About Animals in the Age of Revolution

This book argues that shifting attitudes to nonhuman animals in eighteenth-century Britain affected the emergence of radical political claims based on the concept of universal human rights. It examines a tension in 1790s radicalism between the anthropocentrism of the concept of the ‘rights of man’, and the challenge to human exceptionalism entailed by attempts to extend benevolent consideration to nonhuman animals. The development of a naturalistic and sympathetic literature of animal subjectivity is traced with particular attention to the innovatory representation of nonhuman animal perspectives within children’s literature. The study explores the complex relationship between animal representation and claims for human rights through an investigation of writing by and about four overlapping human groups—children, women, slaves, and the lower classes—whose social subordination was grounded in their cultural construction as less than fully human. Emancipatory movements of political reform, abolition, and feminism, and the animal representations produced within those movements, were affected by the varying forms of animalization applied to each oppressed group. A final chapter considers the legacy of 1790s animal rights discourses in the early-nineteenth-century campaign for anti-cruelty legislation. The book’s many literary animals include the ass, ambiguous emblem of sympathetic animal writing; the great ape or ‘orang-outang’, central to racist discourse; and the pig, adopted by 1790s radicals to signify their rebellion. Writers considered include Sterne, Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Clare, Wollstonecraft, Barbauld, Hays, Mary Robinson, Equiano, Sancho, Cugoano, Clarkson, Thomas Spence, Daniel Isaac Eaton, John Oswald, Joseph Ritson, Thomas Erskine, and John Lawrence.